


Lazarus Writhing

by Margo_Kim



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Canon-Typical Violence, Fullerverse, Gen, Magical Realism, Male-Female Friendship, Violent Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-13
Updated: 2013-06-13
Packaged: 2017-12-14 22:11:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/841936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will has the power to bring the dead back to life with a touch. It's not a gift. It's not a mercy. Beverly doesn't understand. <i>Pushing Daisies fusion.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Lazarus Writhing

**Author's Note:**

> Contains sexualized violent imagery.

Will doesn’t want to touch Kelly Austin, the sixth victim of the Dollmaker. He doesn’t want to jolt her screaming back to life, and he doesn’t want for Beverly to see him do it. But life hasn’t been going Will’s way for the past lifespan so Will doesn’t get what he wants.

Kelly is still screaming as Will gently taps her forehead. The life flows back out of her. The morgue is silent again. Beverly gapes at him, one gloved hand brought almost against her gasping mouth, and Will says, “Careful. You’ve got blood on your hands.” He bends down to tie his shoe, his chest heaving, his stomach turning once he is out of her eyesight. One trip on a shoelace, one outreached hand to catch himself from falling—strange how the smallest things can ruin everything.

Kelly’s screams are still ringing.   

The knot is tied, and Will stares down at it, unable to make himself stand, but he knows he can’t just crouch behind the gurney of a twice dead woman forever. Still he doesn’t stand. The soft sound of footsteps come closer, and Beverly crouches beside him. She says nothing as her piercing eyes rake over him. Head bowed, Will stares at the floor without seeing as he waits for the ax.

“I have severely underestimated the extent of your weirdness,” Beverly says at last.

Will’s mouth twitches somewhere between a grimace and a smile. “That’s a fair assessment.”

She pushes herself to her feet, snaps off her gloves, and holds out her hand. After a long moment, Will takes it, and she pulls him to his feet as if he weighs nothing at all.

They get coffee. There’s a decent café not far from the lab, always crowded with noisy students and grumpy agents, everyone shouting at each other over the ever-increasing din. Beverly flashes her badge and kicks four trainees out of a booth towards the back. “The perks of seniority,” Beverly says as she slides in. Will slouches over his coffee—black, hot, tasteless. Beverly bows her head towards him as well, until they can speak without shouting.

“So how long have you been Jesus?” she asks. Flippant concern. That’s a hard tone to pull off, and it’s practically Beverly’s accent.

“I don’t bring people back from the dead.”

“I just saw pretty compelling evidence otherwise, Will.”

Will jerks his head back and forth. “It’s not…resurrection.” He can’t think of the right word, though. He’s never had to say it aloud. Never had to make another mind understand. “I borrow them from wherever they’ve gone, and I have to return them when I’m done.” He glances at her face before his eyes dart away. She’s not scared, not concerned, not confused. She’s looking at him like he’s a body on her table.

“Explain,” is all she says.

He does. In fits and bursts with ill-formed words in the wrong order, he tells her of finding his father dead of a heart attack when Will was six. Of finding that his father wasn’t dead after Will shook him away. Of finding that next door the neighbor was. He figured out the rules like a scientist, trial and error, replicable results. In Will’s childhood homes, there were no shortage of rats and mice and crawling things that no one would mourn. He squashed them flat or wrung their necks and touched them again to see what happened.

Will doesn’t have to look at Beverly to know that she’s thinking about what the childhood tendency of violence towards animals is a symptom of.

One touch is sixty seconds of life. That’s all he could offer a body, and after that time is up, someone else dies in their place. The second touch kills them forever.

“Your dad? How did you…” Beverly asks. She lets him fill in the rest of the question.

“It wasn’t a problem,” Will says, and she doesn’t bring it up again.

The touch needs to be skin against skin. The forensic precautions of a crime scene help Will quite a lot in that regard. The gloves, the distance, the procedure—they cut down on the risk.

“And you still don’t touch the bodies,” Beverly says.

“No. I don’t.”

Will remembers Elden Stammetz’s tenth victim, tenth living mushroom garden dug up from the cool earth. He remembers the tight hand on his arm, grasping, trying to pull itself out of the dirt. It wanted to live.  As the victim held his arm and squeezed, Will never once wondered if he’d touched the man. He knew he hadn’t. What had made his mouth dry with terror, his legs and stomach as trembling as his heart, was the thought that his power was spreading. Was proximity enough now? Was breathing? Did a follicle of Will’s skin fall like a snowflake on what skin was left of the mushroomed man? That night, Will’s familiar nightmares took a different bent. He walked through the sterile white morgue, his arms bound against him and his skin peeled off, and still from the steel drawers came the screaming, screaming, screaming.  

 “Why don’t you use it?” she asks. “You wouldn’t need to spend so much time in murderers’ heads if you could just ask the victim who did it. Seems like it would save you a lot of trouble and heartache.”

“No. No.” His skin feels too tight at the thought. “They aren’t useful the way you think they’ll be. Death is—” He smiles bitterly. “Death is not gentle. These people didn’t die gently. I could bring them back, I could ask them what happened, but the things they’ll say—” He shakes his head. Or maybe he just shakes. “That’s not mercy or justice. Their pain is over. My job isn’t to make them relive it.”

To bring someone back into pain to serve his own purpose—that is what the monsters do. To wrench them from peace make into the unspeakable agonies of their final hours so that he could ask a question they are beyond caring about, so that he could see just how their final moments came, so that he could force them to give a repeat performance of their death as they begged him to back the pain stop or to help their friend or to please, dear God, let them live, they want to live—this is his design. He does not hang it, but it hangs in the air like the bitter tang of blood.

Beverly looks like she wants to touch him before she thinks better of it. “So you’ll relive it in their place.”  

He relives their murder. He doesn’t relive being murdered. It’s all the difference in the world.

“You’d know best, I guess. Death magic is a bit above my pay grade,” she says. Her coffee’s gone cold, but she drinks it anyway to fill her mouth. Beverly Katz does not know what to say. Will has accomplished the impossible. She’s not at a loss for long. “But not even for the Ripper? Never?”

_The body impaled on the antlers, pale white flesh pierced. The crows at her, the blood gone. She feels as familiar to him as an old song. Are you the Ripper’s, he wants to ask, his hands itching in their gloves. He want to tear the latex with his teeth and run his skin over hers, coax and thrust the life back into her, and as she screams, writhes and screams, he will whisper in her ear, do you feel like a work of art? Do you feel like you have finally become something worth being? When she has told him everything he wants to know, perhaps he’ll stroke her again back into nothing or perhaps he’ll let the seconds tick and see who drops for the crows’ next feast. And she will live; speared and bloodless, she will live; as she begs him to touch her, she will live, and Will’s message to the Ripper will be loud and clear—you can only kill. See what wonders I can make._

“No,” Will says. “Never.”


End file.
